If you have a 70-300 with VR simply try it both ways, on and off, and see if it makes any difference. I too think you will find that when you are using a high shutter speed to freeze the action (say 1/400 sec. and faster) you will find VR doesn't help because that shutter speed is sufficient to also freeze any small movement of the camera created by pressing the shutter release button. VR isn't designed to freeze subject movement. It is designed to cancel out small camera movements occurring when the shutter is open. These small movements will be visible when you are shooting at a shutter speed less than the mm of the lens: shutters speeds less than 1/70th to 1/200th of a second for a 70-200 mm zoom. You are not going to be using shutter speeds that low when shooting moving action.

Almost all 70-200mm lenses have some sort of VR....specially the ones from Nikon...so in that respect you, as a buyer, don't have a choice. If you don't want to use it, just turn it off and see how your pictures turnout.

Personally I find VR to be very important, but given your account name, notimportant, I would guess it is not.

I will just add to JY comment on this. I have only shot a soccer game once, this was a college level game so it did require a pretty quick shutter speed. If your shooting a small kids game the shutter speed will not be as important unless you got a super stud on the field.

To shoot action you need a "fast" lens as most would call it, I might specify action in low light to require it. If most of your soccer games are during the day then its not as important but still might hold some value, plus can give you a bit more in the area of creativity by using its depth of field advantages.

VR/IS/OS helps to cure your movement so the picture is not blurred. It is mainly for shots that have no action so you can use a slow shutter speed and still have a "clean" image in the end. Example, I was shooting a car show indoors, the lighting was bad and they wouldn't let me use my flash. Obvoiusly the cars didn't move so I turned VR on and I was able to hand hold shots at extremely low shutter speeds so I could get more light from my subject with out turning up the ISO. If I didn't have VR then the cars would have been blurry or if I had my ISO up any further it would have washed out the colors even worse along with other effects. If I had cars that moved they would be blurry with a background that was motionless. An example of this same effect can be see at Socalcustoms - shows- 2012 Chattanooga World of Wheels page 3 top center picture. Notice the every object is pretty much motionless but the people walking in from the left are blurred.

Here is my opinion of VR, I like it because it can let me shoot something I might not have gotten without it. If the only purpose for this lens is soccer or fast action sports then I do not think you would need it but if you get urge to shoot a concert or have that perfect sunset shot of downtown from across the river you might want to get a lens with VR. Just as a kicker, the longer the lens the faster the shutter speed has to be so your body movements won't degrade the shot. VR helps to cure this but not a cure all by any means. The other option is have a tripod with you at all times, at that point even with VR turn it off, tripods make VR do funny things.

I plan on shooting soccer games with a D7000 and a f2.8 70-200mm. Question is..do I really need "image stabilization" or "optical stabilization?" The way I'm thinking about it is, if I'm moving the camera from side to side and up and down to get a shot, and not actually keeping the camera in one specific spot, why would I need stabilization?